Don "Moose" Lewis

I suppose everyone has heard of The Producers, the 1968 Mel Brooks movie, the Broadway musical based on it, and the 2005 movie based on the Broadway musical.  Max Bialystock makes a living sweet-talks lonely old ladies into investing in plays that never succeed; his new partner, Leo Bloom, points out that if each “investor” bought a share of the profits, the producers could make a fortune by putting on a play that did not earn profits.  They get hold of the script they deem least likely to attract an audience, a musical called Springtime for Hitler, and sell several hundred percent of the profits to Max’s marks.  To their horror, the play does attracts an audience.  New York theater-goers decide it’s a satire, and that it’s hilarious.  It become a runaway hit.   Faced with profits they have already oversold, Bialystock and Bloom end up in jail. 

Where Bialystock and Bloom made their mistake was in actually producing the play.  Introduce the ticket-buying public to the equation, and you can never be certain how it will turn out.  A man named Don “Moose” Lewis has found a way around this problem. 

The day before the national holiday in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr, Lewis and his associates announced that they were starting a new professional basketball league, the All-American Basketball Association.  The All-American Basketball Association will be open only to players who are “natural born American citizens with both parents of Caucasian race.”  Asked where the proposed league will play its games, Lewis has said that “he hopes to find kindred spirits at private white-flight academies that are prevalent across the southern regions,” according to the Augusta, Georgia Chronicle. 

To me, this last remark is the surest proof that Lewis is another Max Bialystock.  White-flight academies are sitting ducks for anti-discrimination lawsuits, and they know it.  The last thing any of them would do is to make an overt public statement like the one implied in renting a venue to the “All-American Basketball Association.”  Since they know they won’t have to worry about distributing any revenue, Lewis and his confederates can recruit capital from as many people as they can find who are deranged by a powerful love of basketball, an even more powerful hatred of black people, and a weak sense of business.  When the league fails to get off the ground, their subscribers are less likely to demand their money back than they are to hold Lewis and his fellows up as martyrs to their anti-black cause.